Francesca Lia Block, Echo (HarperCollins, 2001)
The best part of this book was the long exhalation of relief when I was finally finished, and could escape its frightening and off-putting characters.
I don't understand it, and after some reflection have decided that I'm OK with that. It's possible there was nothing to understand, and that the story really was as disjointed as it seemed.
An attempt to summarize the plot is a bit difficult, but here I will attempt it.
Mother is an angel. Maybe not a real one, but maybe. Daughter (Echo) is so in awe of her mother that she is unable to fully actualize her own personality, and becomes a bit of a dark shadow version of Mom. Dad is so entranced by his flawless wife that he is unable to focus on his daughter, leaving Echo to complain that she never feels “seen”.
Echo's responses to this home dynamic are promiscuity, drugs, and strange people who also associate themselves with myths or fairy tales, and no one seems to have a strong grasp on reality. No one even has a weak grasp, at that.
I'm sure that a scholar of myth could deduce the connections between this book and it's probable origin with the Greeks, but either I can't find it, or it just isn't worth my time.
Modernized mythology is in fact one of my favorite genres, and it's true that sometimes the telling can stray extremely far from it's source. But to bury a myth in a book which is itself a conundrum seems to me to be going a bit too far off course.
In too many cases nearly entire chapters go by before it can be discerned which character is doing the telling, and to which other characters they might be referring. Time skips around like natural laws have been overruled, and the end product is so confused that it is tempting to just set it down and try a better organized book.
Although Block is known as an author of novels for young adults, I can't quite tell if that's what this is. I've got no sense of what age group this is being aimed at, any more than I can get a sense of Echo's own age.
Everyone in Echo's world is lost, and so, unfortunately is the point of the story.
